Build an app … be a civic hero

Attention civic coders and activists

PublicStuff invites you to create, build, and invent the next generation of civic apps.

Solve problems in your community, bask in glory.

Using our APIs or any open data source, create a mobile-optimized web application you'd like to see available in your community. Once it's approved, we'll publish it to the PublicStuff mobile app in your location. And, if it makes sense to publish in more than one city, we can do that too!

Our platform gives anyone the opportunity to add new features – known as widgets – to the main menu of any municipal app. Publishing is easy so making your code available to the public can happen almost instantly.

Attention Residents

We're soliciting ideas and suggestions from you and putting them in front of technologists with an itch to do good. We call the applications that result from this exchange a "Widget." Within each PublicStuff city page and smartphone app lives a "Widget." These could be anything from a transit schedule to a list of who's who in local government.

This is where you come in. To meet the needs of cities and communities nationwide, we're looking for the next great Widget Idea. Submitting ideas is simple, just tweet it to @PublicStuff using the hashtag #CivicIdeas and it will get seen by our community of civic hackers. Consider this a call for civic innovation!

With return_type=jsonp, you may set an optional callback parameter (default "publicstuffCallback"). Setting callback without return_type implies return_type=jsonp.

Guidelines

PublicStuff’s Civic Developer program aims to nurture the growing civic hacking space by providing a platform for developers to easily obtain build and publish web apps using the PublicStuff platform. By participating in the program, developers will have the opportunity to see their widgets adopted by major metropolitan areas across the country, simply by creating a single, web hosted civically focused web application.

The Civic Developer program is a full service idea engine, uniting developers and non-developers. To meet the specific needs of cities and communities nationwide, residents will be encouraged to submit their ideas for widgets by submitting service requests and gaining supporters. The ideas with the most supporters will become developer challenges.

App submissions are reviewed on a case-by-case basis. Approval is based on a simple set of criteria: quality, usefulness, design and more. If your submission qualifies, we'll publish your app to the appropriate location. While we can't guarantee when a particular app will be approved after submission, we do our best to make sure it gets reviewed in a timely fashion.

About the program

We’re changing the way residents interact with their local government, as part of this effort we created the Civic Developer Program. By uniting local government, residents, and developers we want to build the best possible system for civic engagement.

We call the applications that live within each city page and smartphone app a “Widget.” Some of our most popular Widgets are transit schedules and Public People, which provides residents with a who’s who in their local government.

The Idea Engine powers the entire process, uniting developers and non-developers with government. This is where you come in, to meet the specific needs of cities and communities nationwide, we need you to submit the next great Widget Idea.

Submitting ideas is simple, here's how: Tweet your ideas to @PublicStuff using the hashtag #CivicIdeas and it will get seen by our community of civic hackers.